Over the past quarter century, the people of the Arabian Peninsula have witnessed a revolutionary transformation in higher education. In 1990, there were fewer than ten public universities that offered their Arabic-language curricula in sex-segregated settings to national citizens only. In 2015, there are more than one hundred public, semi-public, and private colleges and universities. Most of these institutions are open to expatriates and national citizens; a few offer gender integrated i...

While some people study globalization, others live their lives as global experiments. This book brings together people who do both. The authors or subjects of these studies are of diverse national, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. What they have in common is a connection to Morocco. It is from this shared space that they draw on personal stories, fieldwork, and literary and linguistic analysis to provide a critical, socially reflexive response to the conceptions of culture, identity, and...

This multidisciplinary volume highlights the transformed nature of the relationship between higher education and society in the 21st century. In particular, it argues that the development of the global university, especially in the non-western world, has transformed the traditional understanding of the relationship between higher education and society. This has important implications for the relations of state, as education has not only become an object of national development policy but f...

What happens when the market tries to help the poor? In many parts of the world today, neoliberal development programs are offering ordinary people the tools of free enterprise as the means to well-being and empowerment. Schemes to transform the poor into small-scale entrepreneurs promise them the benefits of the market and access to the rewards of globalization. Markets of Dispossession is a theoretically sophisticated and sobering account of the consequences of these initiatives...

The extensive changes to Emirati women's traditional rights and roles have been one of the most visible transformations taking place in the United Arab Emirates throughout its almost forty years of modern history. This book offers an interpretation of why and how these modifications came about. Its aim is to analyse the promotion of educational, employment and political rights for women as strategic state actions set within a context of broader nation-building goals. The author discovers t...

The Middle East has been undergoing new crises since the powerful socio-political uprisings known as the Arab Spring took place in several countries in 2011. Some countries are experiencing a long-term collapse of their political and social structures out of internal conflicts and external interventions.The Transnational Middle East posits that, in the Middle East, the development of regional dynamics, of processes and circulations of all kinds, can be documented. In this regard, t...

In the West, news about the Middle East is dominated by an endless stream of reports and commentary about civil war, sectarian violence, religious extremism, and economic stagnation. But do they tell the full story? For instance, who knew that university enrolment in the war-torn Palestinian territories exceeds that of Hong Kong, or that more than a third of Lebanese entrepreneurs are women?Change is on its way in the Middle East, argues Bessma Momani, and its cause is demographic....

A rigorous examination of higher education policymaking in the Arab worldNone of the momentous challenges Arab universities face is unique either in kind or degree. Other societies exhibit some of the same pathologies—insufficient resources, high drop-out rates, feeble contributions to research and development, inappropriate skill formation for existing job markets, weak research incentive structures, weak institutional autonomy, and co-optation into the political ...

Though the Arab Spring has reverberated through the Middle East, largely leaving a path of destruction, the relative calm in the United Arab Emirates has offered a regional roadmap for stability. Domestic changes since 2000 have significantly altered the country’s dynamics, firmly cementing power within Abu Dhabi. While Khalifa bin Zayed succeeded his father as emir of Abu Dhabi and UAE president in 2004, the Emirates’ evolution has largely been accredited to Abu Dhabi’s crown prince, Moha...

In Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats, the most thorough treatment of the political economy of Saudi Arabia to date, Steffen Hertog uncovers an untold history of how the elite rivalries and whims of half a century ago have shaped today's Saudi state and are reflected in its policies.Starting in the late 1990s, Saudi Arabia embarked on an ambitious reform campaign to remedy its long-term economic stagnation. The results have been puzzling for both area specialists an...

The sharp increase in oil revenues since 2002 has left the Arab Gulf States with billions of petro-dollars. But how will these countries fare in the post-oil era? The rulers of these states are taking serious measures to ensure the survival of their economies, and indeed their regimes, in a world with scarce mineral resources. This volume explores the extent to which these countries have been and will be able to prepare for the future by transforming themselves into serious international d...

Despite vast efforts to build the state, profound political order in rural Afghanistan is maintained by self-governing, customary organizations. Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan explores the rules governing these organizations to explain why they can provide public goods. Instead of withering during decades of conflict, customary authority adapted to become more responsive and deliberative. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and observations from dozens of villages across Afghani...